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Transcendentalism is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States. [1] [2] [3] A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, [1] and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.
The name was coined in a January 1837 review of Emerson's essay "Nature" and was intended disparagingly. [6] James Elliot Cabot , a biographer of Emerson, wrote of the group as "the occasional meetings of a changing body of liberal thinkers, agreeing in nothing but their liberality". [ 7 ]
The Transcendentalist is a lecture and essay by American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is one of the essays he wrote while establishing the doctrine of American Transcendentalism. The lecture was read at the Masonic Temple in Boston, Massachusetts in January 1842. [1] The work begins by contrasting materialists and idealists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), [2] who went by his middle name Waldo, [3] was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.
Many of Alcott's and Lane's ideas were derived from Transcendentalism. They were influenced by the Transcendental ideas of God not as the traditional view from the Bible but as a world spirit. [10] Alcott's view of Transcendentalism was a sort of religious anarchism, a renunciation of the world to focus on the spirit. [11]
Fuller agreed with the transcendental concern for the psychological well-being of the individual, [147] though she was never comfortable being labeled a transcendentalist. [148] Even so, she wrote, if being labeled a transcendentalist means "that I have an active mind frequently busy with large topics I hope it is so". [149]
Illustration of Emerson's transparent eyeball metaphor in "Nature" by Christopher Pearse Cranch, ca. 1836-1838. Emerson uses spirituality as a major theme in the essay. Emerson believed in re-imagining the divine as something large and visible, which he referred to as nature; such an idea is known as transcendentalism, in which one perceives a new God and a new body, and becomes one with his ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay called for staunch individualism. "Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.It contains the most thorough statement of one of his recurrent themes: the need for each person to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas.